Nokia releases templates for 3D printed phone cases

Do you own a 3D printer? Do you also own a Nokia Lumia 820?
Well, persons fortunate enough to find themselves in that thinnest
of venn diagram slithers are in for some fun. Nokia's community and
development marketing manager John Kneeland has revealed to the company's Conversations blog that the phone
manufacturer is to release 3D templates and specs for the Lumia
820's casing.

The prospect of 3D printing phone cases is an attempt by Nokia
to recapture the glory days of their "granddaddy" handsets, such as
the 5110 and 5120. The Lumia 820, Nokia's midrange handset running the Windows Phone 8
OS, has been well received -- by releasing 3D templates, case
specs, recommended materials and best practices, Nokia might well
tempt makers and hobbyists to their Lumia handsets as well. Should
the snappily titled "Lumia 820 3D printing community project" take
off, Wired.co.uk wouldn't be surprised to see the Finnish phone
manufacturer releasing additional templates for its other handsets
as it looks to associate itself with the potentially trendsetting
maker community -- anything to recapture some of the smartphone
market from likes of Apple and Samsung.

In order to keep a tab on the community of 3D makers, Nokia
requires that those looking to use their templates register with
them. You can pick up the Lumia 820 mechanical drawings here.

By releasing the templates, Nokia says it is looking to be the
first major phone company to "begin embracing the 3D printing
community and its incredible potential". However, the 3D community
is well ahead of Nokia. Independent maker groups have been
producing 3D phone cases for some time, including Shapeways,
which allows you to snatch sound wave profiles from SoundCloud and
transform them into a case, or Freshfiber,
which produces a wide variety of 3D printed designs for iPhone and
Galaxy handsets.

But, as Kneeland explains in the blogpost, phone cases are only
the start of Nokia's 3D ambitions. The group already uses 3D
printing to mock up prototypes, and Kneeland envisions a future of
"wildly more modular and customisable phones. Perhaps in addition
to our own beautifully-designed phones, we could sell some kind of
phone template, and entrepreneurs the world over could build a
local business on building phones precisely tailored to the needs
of his or her local community. You want a waterproof,
glow-in-the-dark phone with a bottle-opener and a solar charger?
Someone can build it for you -- or you can print it
yourself!"

The prospect of Nokia allowing their phone designs to be hacked and expanded by maker communities is a far more
interesting one than allowing users to print their own
cases. However, Kneeland is keen to emphasise that the full
potential of 3D printing in the manufacturing of custom phones is
still a long way off: "For now, it's a bleeding-edge technology for
bleeding-edge early adopters -- which is exactly where Nokia is
aiming its 3D printing community efforts."

Would you be interested in creating your own 3D case? Let us
know in the comments below.

Edited by Liat Clark

Comments

Nice idea but extremely limited by the printer owners. How about taking the printers to some of the premium shops and allowing visitors to print on demand with the cost of materials? Now that would take the project from labs to streets.

Wacalaca

Jan 19th 2013

Nice idea but extremely limited by the printer owners. How about taking the printers to some of the premium shops and allowing visitors to print on demand with the cost of materials? Now that would take the project from labs to streets.

Wacalaca

Jan 19th 2013

In reply to Wacalaca

Wacala, this is not limited at all. Once people download the model files, nothing stops them from having covers printed by any service bureau.

Randall "texrat" Arnold

Jan 19th 2013

As soon as someone prints one for an extended battery I'll get it! - one of the reasons I got the 820 over the 920 was its removable battery; would be nice if ANYONE was selling 820 batteries though!